The Alchemy of Stone - By Ekaterina Sedia Page 0,92

looking for the enemy through slits carved in metal, their hands tight on musket barrels, while others crawl away for supplies and come back with food or bullets. We know too that there are men hiding in the buildings, in every doorway along the street, waiting for an opportunity to take aim.

We notice a strange creature—similar to the one that had turned us, and yet different, for it does not smell of stone—toddle around the pond. We take positions to watch its progress, and we feel protective of it. We wonder if the mechanical girl is nearby then, if she’s among those hidden, waiting to storm the barricades. We wonder if the creature is carrying an important message, and we decide to guard it.

But it is only little, and men at the barricades do not see or pay attention to it. It climbs and flows over the barricades, and we follow. Here in the open, it is hard to hide but we slide through the shadows and the sparse bushes fringing the pond, we hover hidden by the low veil of smoke. We see behind the barricades, into a maze of fortifications and crates, people and automatons. We hover in the ash-filled fog and watch—we are not afraid that we will be seen; everyone is looking into the streets, not to the sky.

The homunculus is heading for the man lying on the ground, sleeping or resting or dead. No, not dead—he raises his head and he sees the creature. He sits up, slowly, sluggishly, and we recognize him by his twisted face. He holds his right arm to his chest with his left hand, and we see the dark right sleeve grown darker with blood. He looks at the homunculus as if he recognizes it, and he smiles.

“Come here, little fellow,” he says, and extends his injured arm. “Come here, I’ll feed you.”

The homunculus totters closer and drinks fat lazy drops falling from the man’s fingertips.

“There you go,” the man says, and he smiles with one side of his mouth. His motions are languid, as if he had just awakened—even when his eyes flicker upward to meet ours, he does not look startled or hurried. He doesn’t look away from us, but speaks to the creature. “You’ll be my friend now, yes?”

The thing burbles in the affirmative, and laps at the pool of blood collected on the ground, and it swells up, up, like a rising loaf of bread.

The homunculus swells almost to bursting as it sops up the wounded man’s blood—not beautiful anymore, we whisper to ourselves. Never again, because there is just no going back with those things.

The wounded man rises to his knees, then to his feet, pushing himself off the ground with his good arm. The injured one only gets in the way and bleeds more. The people by the barricades look up—their faces so similar now, all hollow-cheeked and half-hidden in the thatches of ungroomed beards.

“Where are you going, Loharri?” one of them says, an older man with a generous sprinkling of gray in his beard and long hair. “The alchemists are coming to take care of the wounded, they will have something to stem the bleeding.”

“Look around you,” he says. “No one is coming.”

“You’re not going to forget your mechanic’s oath, are you?” the older man says.

Loharri shakes his head. “I’m not forgetting anything. But I will go, and I will talk to them, and if you want to shoot me in the back then help yourself.”

“You have no authority to negotiate,” the older man says.

Loharri smiles and looks down at the homunculus, which is pooling around his feet, just a fat blood smear. “I have as much authority as you do,” he says. “That is, not much. But enough to see what can be saved.” He looks at the pile of metal with sadness in his eyes, the same sadness we feel when we look down at all the children of our city whom we cannot help.

And then he walks between the twisted metal bars as tall as a man, and climbs over the corrugated sheets piled on top of each other. Once he reaches the top, he stops and thinks, crouching down for stability, but we can see that it takes him a lot of effort to remain upright.

He searches through his pockets and extracts a handkerchief—it used to be white at some point of its existence, but now it is crusted with blood and dirt. He waves it in the air;